


Babygirl

by maxbegone



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Character Death, Father-Daughter Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Reunions, Spoilers, Spoilers - The Last of Us, The Last of Us Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:35:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25213264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maxbegone/pseuds/maxbegone
Summary: The exhaustion he feels when running from infected is normally fixed with a good night’s rest. Hunting infected, dealing with them is second-nature. It’s like clockwork to Joel. It’s what roughly twenty-five years of living in a post-apocalyptic world will do to you.Endure and survive,her comics say.
Relationships: Ellie & Joel (The Last of Us), Joel & Sarah (The Last of Us)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 57





	Babygirl

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not quite finished with this game yet, I'm probably only halfway-through, but I needed to get this off my chest.
> 
> My first thought after That Scene was, "He's with Sarah," and then I promptly cried.
> 
> The Last of Us has, over and over again, changed the way I write characters and perceive them. I've learned so much from this game as a storyteller. In a way, I am indebted.

The searing pain in his knee is gone and now replaced with the overwhelming exhaustion taking over his body. It’s quite unlike anything he’d ever experienced before.

The exhaustion he feels when running from infected is normally fixed with a good night’s rest. Hunting infected, dealing with them is second-nature. It’s like clockwork to Joel. It’s what roughly twenty-five years of living in a post-apocalyptic world will do to you. 

_Endure and survive,_ her comics say.

The exhaustion he felt several years back when he fell from that second story balcony in Colorado while fighting off that hunter was remedied by slipping in and out of consciousness - mostly out - for several weeks. It was a brutal winter. If he thinks hard enough, Joel can still feel the nip of the mid-western cold in his bones and the soreness of his abdomen. The scar healed as well as it could when a fourteen-year-old was the one who stitched it up. 

The exhaustion he felt when he was young, after running through the woods behind the house he and Tommy grew up in, wasn’t really exhaustion. It was heaving laughter as he pushed his brother into the creek only to get dragged with him. It was youth, it was adrenaline, it was all carefree. He was limber then, and so was Tommy. 

But this...This was unlike any other.

Clocked to the head, beaten slowly and bleeding out while a tourniquet was tied around his blown-out knee. He and Tommy were swarmed by infected and all they could do was run. 

And run they did, right into this young woman who helped fend them off. She took them back to where her crew was hiding out. They didn’t know it would be a trap. How could they? 

Joel knows this much; Tommy’s on the ground somewhere across the room. His pack is tossed aside somewhere. The conversations around him sound like they’re miles-deep underwater. Warped words, foggy.

 _If this is it,_ he thinks as he lays against the floor, _then this is it._

He knew he wasn’t going to go beautifully or peacefully. Joel always knew his end would be brutal. He just didn’t know _when._

He tried to reason with these people, extend his time in this vicious world just a little longer. It resulted in a shotgun to the knee and being pinned to windows, the young woman he and his brother helped seething in his face. He’d scanned his memories, briefly as pain and nausea built up, but he didn’t recognize any of them. 

The woman...

Joel sees her. It’s all he’s been able to focus on in his hazy brain for the last hours or days or years she’s been standing over him with a nine iron. 

The face of a woman; weathered and worn, angry, with heavy creases between her brows and the so-strong gritting of teeth he thinks they might crack.

The eyes of a child; sad, innocent, brimming with tears as she raises her arms above her head and swings downward. Over and over and over again.

He remembers succumbing to exhaustion - the _heaviest_ exhaustion his body’s ever been subjected to - before there was absolutely nothing. 

And somewhere far away he hears her, too. She’s here, she found him, he wishes she didn’t. He flits his gaze to her, it’s a split-second before it’s all over.

She’s bleeding. She’s struggling. There are people on top of her and she’s screaming. But he can’t move, Joel can’t even get his fingers to twitch. 

He remembers Ellie. She’s here, Joel can see her.

_Babygirl._

One last downward swing. He doesn’t feel it. He doesn’t hear a thing. Exhausted, he stares at Ellie. He’s done all he can do for her.

 _Babygirl,_ he thinks, one last time, _endure and survive._

\--

This is quite the contrast to the lodge. 

Everything is golden and sunny. It’s a bit hazy and humid today. The buzzing of insects is the first thing that hits his ears. The second is the rushing of the breeze. He feels it on his skin and in his hair. 

Joel stands, his feet planted, in a wide yard with partially-dry grass and a big house in front of him. There’s a rickety truck parked in front of an open garage, one with a dent by the back right wheel well and a scratch on the passenger’s door.

He stretches up to the sky. It’s sunset, he notes the long shadows and orange-pink sky. The way the sun casts light right into the front windows. 

His bones crack but they don’t ache. He’s much more limber, much younger, he thinks, than he should be. His left shoulder doesn’t bother him from the way he leans when he works on building his guitars or carving the arms of a rocking chair he’s been commissioned. He feels, and he just might be, twenty-five years younger.

Joel breathes in deeply. The world around him is fresh and crisp. There isn’t a sourness or staleness like he’s used to, being carried in the wind. Blood or rotting flesh. There isn’t a scent of sterile equipment or thickness of wood varnish, either.

“Daddy?”

Joel turns slow. He swears he’s dreaming. His hands find his hair - it’s much shorter, and if he were to look in the mirror he’s sure he will find it’s less grey - and tug on the roots of it. They slide from the crown of his head, to the back of his neck and then to his hips, where he bends over and heaves a sob. 

It’s disbelieving. 

Her hair is short, chin-length, and tucked back behind her ears with a headband. She has on a blue and white checkered dress, the one she wore on her first day of school that year, months before the outbreak, and a pair of white canvas shoes. 

She has her mother’s smile and his eyes, and she’s standing a hundred feet away, or maybe only ten, Joel isn’t quite sure, in the middle of the dry grass. Her cheeks are red and her freckles are prominent.

Joel runs.

Sarah meets him halfway.

His knees don’t hurt as he sprints across to her. He picks her up, her arms encircling his neck as they spin around before falling to the ground with her cradled against him.

Joel presses his face into her neck and cries. She cries, too and when she asks why they’re both crying, in her sweet voice that he’s missed so much, he just cups her cheeks and smiles at her. 

There’s a flash, and suddenly Joel sees her in the clothes from her last night; The Bash written on her pajama shirt, her checked pants. When he blinks again, she’s back in that lovely dress, a grade-A student and his soccer star who’s going to be the next great six-string player.

Something compels him to look at his wrist. His watch, the one she gifted him on his birthday all those years ago, or maybe not quite yet, sits in mint condition. The leather is pristine, the face is unbroken. It ticks away and away.

Joel’s lips pull into a wide grin. 

“Sarah,” he whispers, voice catching on the last syllable. 

“Hi, Daddy,” she says back, and Joel promises to never let her go, just like he did the day she was born.

Because she’s here in his arms and after two and a half decades he’s with her again. He’s with her now, he’s with Sarah.

He thinks of Ellie - these two would be as thick as thieves and would give him more grey hairs than he had on his last day. 

He thinks of her and promises to look over her, wherever she is.

Joel pulls his daughter to his chest again and rocks back and forth. The breeze passes around them, and soon they’re laughing together. It’s like music.

She’s here. She’s in his arms. 

_Babygirl._

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! You can find me [@maxbegone](maxbegone.tumblr.com) on tumblr.


End file.
